I have never been smart about money. My sister and I say it’s a personal rebellion to our father’s thrifty nature. But in my case I think it was because I never made enough money to do much more than spend it. That all sounds so foolish now and my hope is that our children will manage their fiscal future differently.

Although they can’t do much at this point, because there are student loans and there are difficult mortgage payments and credit card debt. But it’s too bad to hit retirement age and not have a nest egg with a little more yolk in it.

Like many working people my husband and I never had much socked away. Mostly we just had our paychecks.

We have friends who made bundles in the dotcom era, some who are wizards in the stock market and a few backwoods types who did well in the weed market. And a couple who simply inherited astounding wealth. I’ve tried to not be envious of the relatively well-off, knowing that will surely set up a bad karma detour on my own road to riches.

I didn’t really aspire to be a rich person. As long as I made an okay salary and I had a pension plan and there was a little bit in a 401k and there would always be social security and of course, we owned our goldmine, that is, our little piece of fail-safe real estate in fantasy-priced Wine Country.

What is so disappointing is that while I was never very smart about money, I counted on others to be exceptionally smart. I’m talking about the big money brains. Who stand in front of the NASDAQ board on TV to say that things are good or bad or about to change, but not to worry because they understand this stuff. And so we don’t have to.

So when they paled under their makeup and looked like nervous accountants packing up to leave town and said things like this should never have happened and muttered words like impending catastrophe…..Well, you knew we were all in trouble.

Hope that the solution is more than putting lipstick on a piggy bank.

After 9/11 there was much talk about our enemies, the people who wanted to wreck our way of life. But it turned out we are capable of doing it ourselves.

Some of those smart people we expected to take care of the economy did not. They were more reckless than a no-money-down homeowner with multiple credit cards going on a Christmas shopping binge. Squandered their equity. Nothing in savings.

Now they want to be bailed out and we are told that for the economic health of the country- maybe for the sake of the whole world’s stability - we have no choice but to help bail them out. And hope that the solution is more than putting lipstick on a piggy bank.

We little guys wouldn’t be bailed out. We would be told it was our fault that we didn’t save for a rainy day. Or that we didn’t save enough. Or too bad that we saved in an unsecured financial institution. And put our faith in our equity.

Some of us could have been smarter about our money and that’s a regret. But you know, even if we had, we still might be in a scary, shaky place not of our making.

Because it turns out that the big guys with all that money and power turned out to be simply greedy and not very smart at all.

Listen to the Got Billions? Podcast at Another Voice on KRCB-FM

In the story about the national candidate who once tried to bully the town librarian, the details about censorship proved to be only partially true.

With the first mention of how the one-time mayor of Wasilla, Alaska tried to use her moose-bagging brawn to get some books banned, the internet immediately spat out a list of titles that were alleged to be on the mayor’s hit list.

For those already alarmed by this person’s politics, it was a tasty, outlandish list which included Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn. But the doomed titles proved too bad to be true. There was no list. The story remains, however, that the mayor did indeed ask the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books. Seems that for some time a group of social conservatives in town had been pressing the library to remove books they considered immoral. Sometimes library books would be returned with pages defaced or ripped out.

The librarian said no way would she be all right with that. And a few months later the librarian got a letter from the mayor telling her she was fired. The mayor didn’t say it was because she’d been scarred by Judy Blume or Margaret Atwood, but because she doubted the librarian’s support, like she’d failed some type of loyalty test. Fortunately this sent enough shivers through the book-loving townspeople that they rallied behind the librarian and she kept her job.

A banned books list is a sure way to get many people inflamed. We don’t DO that in this country. Or at least we are surprised when we find out that some people actually try to do that. The idea of banning books is so un-American that every fall the American Library Association puts on Banned Books Week. This year, from Sept. 27 to Oct.4.

I always find the displays of books that someone once wanted to ban not only ludicrous but shocking. Imagine. “The Diary of Anne Frank” considered “a real downer”!! And Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” challenged for encouraging premarital sex???

Don’t these people know about choice? As in, if you don’t like a book, choose not to read it.

In the story of the mayor versus the librarian it’s clear who turned out to be the hero. It’s also clear that the person who would want to maybe some day be leader of the free world doesn’t think a whole lot of free speech.

In Sonoma County we are rich in many things. Wine, olive oil, lavender, goat cheese, designer chickens and the like. Plus a healthy community of writers and thinkers of all persuasions. Every year for the past eight, there’s been a book festival in downtown Santa Rosa. The Sonoma County Book Festival is one of the few remaining book fairs around, the only one of a general nature in the San Francisco Bay Area. It happens this Saturday, a day long gathering in Courthouse Square, with author readings and panels on everything from memoir to mystery to the environment and football. I’ll be there, along with writers like Julia Whitty, Adair Lara, Noelle Oxenhandler and David Harris, at various venues, including, of course, the library.

Celebrating the art of writing and the joy of reading is a good way to counter the anti-intellectual fervor being stirred up in this election. Pick up a book, wave it high and say, “I vote for free expression.” It’s also a good opportunity to thank your librarian.

Listen to the Vote No on Book Banners Podcast at Another Voice on KRCB-FM

I’ve been in Austin this week writing with my daughter. We set up our two laptops at opposite ends of her dining room table, stayed tuned for hurricane updates and played with words.

Sam is the newest writer in the family and has a book deadline the end of September. I am here to be a copy editor before she sends her manuscript off to her New York editors.

I think of us like mother and daughter piano players. Or mother and daughter painters with side by side canvases. We share the same passion for the craft even though we have different styles and references. “Who is Damien Rice” I inquire about one of her musical mentions. And she pulls up iTunes to educate me.

We are wordies. Some call us endangered. Words are not given as much respect as they once were. Book contracts are sparse. Books themselves are shorter, adjusting to the shrinkage of readers’ attention spans. Same with newspapers, where my writing comes from, which are skinnier, owing to news junkies lured over to online blogs and 24/7 cable news.

We are wordies. Some call us endangered.

The traditional word form is threatened and yet many people keep at it. My friend Ellen just finished a novel set in Greece. Pam in Mexico is taking notes on the ex-pat community. Sophie is working on a mystery. Jan is writing a tragic memoir about a mutual high school friend.

We write books because we read books. None of us can imagine our world without them. Given an extra hour in a strange town we seek out a book store. We’d never go to bed or take a bath or pack for a trip without a book.

I watch my daughter wrinkle her forehead and scrunch her eyes searching for the right word. Without first googling. Or going to a Thesarus. She scans her own memory to deliver the perfect anecdote or piece of dialogue that will be so good she will stop to applaud herself.

People who would like to write a book think that authors sit at home in their pajamas experiencing daily epiphanies and drinking cold coffee. Except for the epiphanies they are right. Some days you’d rather work at a bank.

Today’s at-home writers need to do more than come up with words. If you have an editor waiting in New York you are also brainstorming marketing ideas before you finishing writing the introduction.

That is because if you are of the lucky few, you will one day have to get out of your pajamas and turn into a hottie intellectual who can dazzle a talk show host who hasn’t read your book. Writers now have to be camera-ready. HD camera ready. I tell Sam she’s lucky to have good cheekbones.

I’m thrilled we share the same world. I imagine her eavesdropping on airport conversations and scribbling dialogue. I expect she’d be more excited to meet a David Sedaris than a Johnny Depp.

She gives me a “hold on there, mother” look and says, “Actually, that would be a toss-up.”

Listen to the World of Wordies Podcast at Another Voice on KRCB-FM